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J !wj# - C-- ( Ih d !S · RUSSeLL Town & Country JemIma Kettering Ohio I I E & TinA TYß 1'-27 1 Two shows nightly { THE røgp E M Reserv8 lions (212) 355-3000 No Minimum-Tickets from $8 50 CHARglT BY PHONE: Maj, Cred Cards (212) 239-7177 JOEY HEATHERTON APRIL 20 MAY 1 , , , ,#'" .." . ..." "" ./" . .;. " . than before, and those who saw her in her most demanding dramatic role, in "The Nun's Story," know that she can act. But all you can do here IS look at her, and, when she's senten- tious, feel sorry about the waste Most of the movie is taken up by the plots against Robin and by the fighting he engages in A whole new army of ragged farmers joins him in the woods, but the film avoids building up any spIrit of fellowship among the op- pressed. The contest isn't between op- pressors and oppressed; it's between Robin and Robert Shaw's Sheriff of Nottingham, who, not unexpectedly, turns out to be realistic-minded and a fair, if wily, adversary. He curls a thin- lipped smile as he sets a trap for Robin. "I know him," the Sheriff says. "He's a little bit in love with death. . . . He flirts, he teases. I can wait." Connery and Hepburn are a love match. James Goldman and Richard Lester aren't. I don't think that the emotion we feel about Connery and Hepburn would hreak through so ur- gently if the director didn't feel it. Lester must be trying for sOInething simpler and more human than what he's been up to in recent years. He seems to be working on equal terms with the actors; this picture isn't just his show. He lets Richard Harris carry a scene or two, and Nicol \Villiamson, : who isn't saddled with too many ora- ft torical passages, carries several. Wil- liamson uses his twanginess for a light, bemused effect that is very appealing in the early part of the film, when we accept Little John's loyalty to Robin as a comic-sidekick relationship. But once John actually defines himself as nothing more than Robin's friend, a masochistic whine wrecks the fun. StIll, he and Connery don't fare badly. Con- nery's wide-eyed, blunt Robin has its own heroic-warrior force-that of a Ulysses or a Macbeth. The film wants to expose heroism as a sick fraud, yet it also wants this grizzled-giant hero in all his pictorial beauty. As in " Th L . . W . " h ' e Ion In Inter, t ere s no comprehending the characters' self-def- initions, or their switches of mood, aim, strategy. They strike poses-whimsical modern attitudes that Goldman gives them for the sake of paradox. And how can a director achieve plain glorious feeling when the script is trying to at- tain grandeur of sentiment by such flossy means as having the Sheriff of NottIngham calculate on Robin Hood's death fixation Somehow-it must be a matter of temperament, although, of course, it's also related to his continuing success , / MARCH 22, 197b in TV commercials-Lester has nev- er developed into a master of long sequences. He doesn't appear to have the patience or the sound equipment for Goldman's formal lines, which demand to be heard right down to the dead let- down, and the higher rhetoric mixes so oddly with his usual airy overheards that his technique seems indifferent, convictionless. In most of Lester's films, bit players abound; often they are well- known actors who turn up for a gag or two, and they help to populate the screen-to give it a gibbering vitality. But Goldlnan's text makes such a rigid distinction between the principals and the bit players that for the first time in a Lester film the bit players are faceless. Even Denholm Elliott, who pldYs \Vil] Scarlett, stays cramped in his tiny role. Visually, Lester is no slouch; except for the salon -photography look of the be- ginning and the end, he keeps the images active. Yet nothing seems to come of this activity-no suspense, no spirit of adventure. The most emotionally upsetting ele- ment is that Lester doesn't adapt his Keatonesque, almost abstract use of the film frame or his editing style to the brutal combat. The editing touch is so deft and clipped that the line between tragic horror and joking make-believe has got smudged. \Ve don't know when the film is fooling and when it isn't, or whether to be tickled or appalled- and so we sit in discomfort, listening to the fake warmth of John Barry's picture-postcard score. G?ldman's speeches about the inevitability of cruel- ty don't make much sense in a movie that treats men mangling each other as a medieval version of the Three Stooges. The Sheriff's first words as he looks at his soldiers are "They never learn." And the film's contempt for those who fight-they are viewed as blood thirsty clowns-goes so far that at the end, when Robin Hood's ill-equipped farmers battle against the King's arlnored legions, the movie veers off in a different direction and ;) '& (q: m lbro i I ß'I